Objectives: To introduce participants to quantitative benefit-harm assessment that may be used by guideline developers, regulatory agencies or treatment decision-makers (i.e. patients and clinicians).

Description: Systematic reviews synthesize best available evidence on treatment benefits and harms, but a further step is to use such evidence to facilitate decision-making. Benefit-harm assessment is useful to weigh the trade-off between benefits and harms of medical interventions and helpful to decision-makers. To conduct a proper benefit-harm assessment, correct selection of data sources is important, but often unrecognized by researchers. Information that goes into a benefit-harm assessment may come from randomized trials, observational studies, preference-eliciting surveys and systematic reviews and meta-analyses.We will discuss and provide guidance on how to define a proper question for quantitative benefit-harm assessment and how input data can be selected to conduct benefit-harm assessment.

In this workshop we will start with an introduction of quantitative benefit-harm assessment. We will use real world examples and discuss which research questions benefit-harm assessments aims to address. After this workshop participants will have a basic understanding of benefit-harm assessment and how evidence selection for benefit-harm assessment can be done.